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IPv6 is coming sooner rather than later November 6, 2006

Posted by Al in : Internet , trackback

This may not mean much to many readers, but it means a lot to me and to others in the Internet market. IPv6 is necessary, reliable, and will definitely improve Internet access for a large number of countries and companies. Unfortunately IPv6 is not compatible with the current IPv4 and will incur massive costs to implement correctly. These costs will have to be borne by the companies involved, mainly ISPs and Telco providers, as well as their governments. The main reason why we are having to switch to IPv6 sooner rather than later – China. Or, more specifically, ICANN’ failure to allocate enough IP addresses to the Far East initially, huge ranges of IP’s were allocated to US companies rather than Far Eastern countries – and so China decided rather than get their ever expanding network working using the limited number of IP’s that they had, and then using NAT on top, instead they would move to IPv6 now.

With China moving to IPv6, and with other fast growing Internet markets in the East also running dangerously low on IPv4 addresses, the whole Internet will be forced to move to IPv6 as soon as possible. If they don’t then then Far East market may become very awkward to communicate with, and slow and unreliable communication is not something that can be tolerated in today’s market. I was interested to read, in this article, that India was also looking to move to Ipv6 as well, because my company has staff and support centres in India and the communication to, and from, them is entirely network based. Although this is an entirely private network at the moment it is possible that a move to IPv6 may be required to allow sufficiently quick access to their systems. I was also interested to read that ATM transmission, which is used for almost all long range data transmission, whether digital or voice, could be heavily impacted by IPv6; however I feel that rather than allow packet size to drop so small, once IPv6 begins to become more widespread then packet size will be increased, which will then provide further impetus for any legacy IPv4 systems to upgrade to IPv6. I think the entire Internet will face a huge slow-down very soon, as IPv6 begins to spread, but then as more and more companies adopt the protocol then things will improve and should, eventually, be better than they are now.

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